


Gotham's Ordinary People

by MadJJ



Category: Batman - All Media Types, Batman: The Animated Series
Genre: Gotham is a gloomy city, Mention of Domestic Violence, mention of psychological abuse, one shots
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-02
Updated: 2016-09-30
Packaged: 2018-08-12 14:16:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 2,151
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7937806
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MadJJ/pseuds/MadJJ
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They are the people who don't appear in the headlines, people you'd never heard of, those you don't care about. That doesn't mean they do not exist, hidden in the crowd. They are the crowd. Their lives in Gotham is sometimes bland, sometimes joyless...</p><p>Sometimes they gravitate around the city with the infamous reputation for a good reason.</p><p>Whoever they are, whatever they could become...</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Magda the Fat

They called her Magda the Fat. They could have call her Magda the Nice, had she looked a little more amiable, but she always had had a resting-bitch face. And she never had a reason to smile (she made a point of never let her mouth twitch when the Joker told a joke – it wouldn’t do to laugh at some psychopath’s sense of humour) so she also wore a scowl.

She wasn’t there to look pleasant though. She brought Arkham’s residents their dinner, cleaned their cells when they were at their doctor’s appointment and she put up with the doctorate snobs that thought they could treat her like a nobody because she earned in a year the money they made in a month. It wasn’t the most glamorous job, but someone had to do it, and Magda was willing to do it.

It didn’t mean she liked the way they called her. The doctors, the inmates, the guards and even the other elderlies, they all snickered behind her back.

The one advantage of being overlooked by everyone was that while they mocked her, they didn’t actively hate her. It was very useful when there was a breakout. Not only did she look harmless (even though she had some experience in brawling) but no one wanted to take revenge on Magda the Fat because they were mistreated by her. There was always that one rookie guard that acted tough and slapped a little too much the inmates around. They’d brag on how they’d beaten up some high-profile criminal, only to be offed the next week when said criminal escaped.

Magda wasn’t the nicest, or the prettiest, but she was competent and she knew that the best way to keep her job, as shitty as it was, and her life, was that her reputation shouldn’t rise above a stupid moniker for them to mock her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Magda is inspired by the nurse who appears in the episode "Fear of Victory". She's seen a brief instant as the one in charge to bring the Scarecrow his meal.


	2. Danny the Dummy

Danny didn’t get out much when he wasn’t at his job. And he didn’t exactly have a good job, but it paid the bills and he could afford all kind of hobbies to keep his mind of things. Like memories.

Memories were hard to avoid when His threatening figure started moving again on the TV’s screen. It didn’t happen often, but when it did, Danny took a day off. He came to work on time every day, and he even took shifts for his colleagues at the bar when they had some important personal business coming up, so no one ever said anything to him.

Thankfully, the Scarecrow was never on the streets for long because the Batman was watching over the city, but Danny could not help it. He was not to blame, He had messed with his mind, it was His fault!

Every time he saw him, he remembered. He had once big dreams, ambition, hopes to become a great doctor who would work with patient to help them overcome their own fears.

_But how could you help them when you can’t even help yourself, Dummy?_

He had given up because of Professor Crane – the Scarecrow. He did not know how to call him these days, not anymore. He should probably consider what he called him – his name from his teaching days would be a way to keep him as human as possible, and his new name a word to illustrate this ominous figure of nightmare which haunted Danny’s mind.

Yes, Danny was a promising once, but that was before he agreed to the experiments –

_Your own damn fault, you Fool_

\- and began to face his fear of failure, only to crumble and be destroyed by the hallucinations. His father, ashamed of him, his professor, insulting him (sometimes he wondered if that part had truly been an hallucination).

But if Danny never tried anything more ambitious, something he’d risk failing at, then there was no way he could really be disappointed, because he’d never know if he’d actually stand a chance. Uncertainty felt more comforting. Uncertainty wasn’t scary.


	3. Chris the Survivor

The first time it happened, he was completely unprepared. Young men of twenty-three, he had just moved out of his parents’ house into the city. He had heard that the neighbourhood wasn’t the most welcoming, but it couldn’t be that bad now, could it?

 

The mugging left him with enough wounds to spent three weeks in the hospital, and he still felt the pain in his ribs for another month afterwards. _Never again_ , he told himself.

 

He could have move out of the city, get far away from Gotham, but that would mean giving up, and Chris wasn’t a quitter. So he started training. His subscription to the club didn’t cost him much, and he always had been athletic. He just traded running in the park for martial arts and free-style boxing (because sometimes there was no way out and you could not run). He considered buying a gun, then decided against it, learning instead every way possible to disarm an opponent. Relying on a gun would do him no good if he could not defend himself without it. A gun was but an object, easy to lose.

 

He wasn’t the best (his point wasn’t to become a fighting machine, he just wanted to be able to fend for himself) but he managed well enough. It reassured him. Life settled down for him. He still lived in the same neighbourhood but he was careful not to go out late and he stopped worrying all the time after a while.

 

Two years after his aggression, he was taken hostage in a bank robbery by Two-Face. Chris had better knowledge on how to fight, but he also knew when not to use the new found skills. It would only worsen things. Two-Face decided to kill half the hostages at random. Chris was amongst the one designated. He didn’t have the time to think about how he’d get out of the situation before the Batman intervened. With the attention of the villain elsewhere, the hostages managed to escape.

 

Chris had been lucky, he guessed, but his paranoia had returned. He started reading everything he could get his hands on about psychology to better understand how criminals would act in a situation of aggression.

 

Life was back on track, but Chris didn’t let his guard down.

 

Three years later, a week before his twenty-eights birthday, he got caught in another villains’ scheme. It was the Riddler this time, who wanted to trap the Batman by alluring him with random, innocent citizens he’d use as bait. Once the video was filmed though, the Riddler stated that he didn’t _actually_ need them alive, and was about to kill them when Chris spoke up. Wouldn’t it be more interesting if Batman had not only to enter the safe rigged with explosive to find the code which would lead him to the next Riddler’s clue, but _also_ to save the innocent people from asphyxia?

 

Chris’ memory on that specific moment were a little blurred, what with the impendent promise of death and the adrenaline flooding his body, so he couldn’t recall how exactly he chose the words that convinced the Riddler. Next things he knew, they were trapped in the safe with nothing to do but wait for Batman. Chris didn’t have a clue how he could postpone the inevitable date with death again, but the Batman was as resourceful as ever.

 

Once he got out, he bailed on his birthday party. No one blamed him. A traumatic experience, everyone said. Too soon.

 

Chris didn’t think it was too soon to get back out there though.

 

He was not going to give up and run away. He was going to adapt. Because it was how humans worked. He just had to make sure to be prepared.

 

He learned everything he could about survival in hostile environment, how to deal in a situation of kidnaping, how to use the simplest tools to get out of any situation, how to get out of restrains, how to turn random objects in weapons.

 

His obsession got him a nickname. “Survivor Man”. Yes, they were making fun of him, using the recent recrudescence in superheroes as a base for the moniker. Sure, no one really understood, arguing that he had had his fair share of adventures. Everyone knew someone in Gotham who, at some point, would become a victim of some sort of crimes. But those things didn’t repeat themselves.

 

Chris didn’t argue with them. They could say all they wanted. It didn’t deter him. For he knew, you can never tell when a new skill can be useful, just as you never know when your life can turn around.


	4. Marlene the Widow

“ _I heard what happened to your husband. You have all our support. Our sincere condolences._ ”

 

Most of the people who told her that didn’t actually know George. If they did, they’d probably say something else.

 

“ _What a relief it must be_.”

 

“ _Good riddance._ ”

 

“ _You must be happy to be free again._ ”

 

But no one really knew him, because no one cared enough to know. Poverty and crime were the two happy daughters of Gotham, going hand in hand. It was normal for someone poor to live in Crime Alley, therefore it was normal for them to be seen with bruises, gifts of another unfortunate soul who had nothing but their fists to gain their bread.

 

Marlene often used it as an excuse. People around her probably didn’t want to ask why the wounds started disappearing altogether after George’s passing. They’d rather talk about how unlucky it had been that he’d take that specific train that morning. He had no way of surviving the bombing. A tragic story, really.

 

Although Marlene felt awful for all the other victims of the terrorist attack, she could not bring herself to think it was a bad thing that her husband died in it… In a city where notorious criminals could kill hundreds of people with a sneeze, no one cared about the lesser evil, the one that happened in the household behind closed curtains.

 

George had never been a good husband. She was happy he was gone. She still had a little money from his insurance. She was happy.

 

She should have been happy.

 

But sometimes, just sometimes, even though she knew how horrible he had been, she felt the loneliness creep into her heart, along with the fear of being alone in this damned city.


	5. Charles the Coward

You never know how you will react in a situation of danger. You can imagine you’d be a hero, or you could train to do the right thing, but you never really know until you’re confronted with the real thing.

Charles remembered every minutes, every seconds of it. He kept replaying the events in his mind. The sound of the firing gun was always somewhere in the back of his mind, or her cry as her body fell to the ground. The unmistakable laughs of the terrifying monster who had killed her.

Sometimes he tried to reason with himself. What could Charles have done? He had a gun, and Charles was unarmed. He was quick and experimented, and Charles didn’t know the most basic thing about fighting. He probably had it all planned out, and Charles was just coming home, passing randomly through that alley only because of the trains being cancelled that day.

Even if he had tried anything, what could Charles have really accomplished? He would have ended up dead, just like her. He didn’t even know her name then.

Charles must have been sick for trying to know who she was. But he discovered it. She was a doctor, she had saved many lives and was on the brink of a grand discovery which would have helped thousands of people. Now, because of her death, the research would take several more years.

Charles… Charles was nothing. He was nothing important. He could have sacrificed himself.

He could have stepped out from behind the garbage can and shout at him to distract his attention from the gorgeous brunette. She would have run, stumbling a little in her black high heels, but managing to escape as he received the bullet instead of her.

He could have tried to grab the killer from behind. As they would have struggled, the lady doctor would have run. A shot could have been fired, of course, but she’d still would have stood a chance.

He could have screamed for help, for some authority, for anyone, really, he could have kicked the can to make a loud mess. He could have thrown him his suitcase.

He could have done so much more.

Instead, he had just stayed there, between the dirty garbage can and the wall of brown bricks, quivering in his fifteen dollars shoes and repressing his wailings behind his gloved hand, holding tight onto his suitcase filled with meaningless reports on the latest Wayne Company’s policy as the maniac killed her.

**Author's Note:**

> Magda is inspired by the nurse who appears in the episode "Fear of Victory". She's seen a brief instant as the one in charge to bring the Scarecrow his meal.


End file.
